@Mikey: Yes, I was mostly thinking of the Animania magazine. It comes with a DVD with lots of stuff on it, mostly Anime episodes, so that should be a good place to spread visual novels. Also, there is now a larger number of "Asian lifestyle" magazines. They seem to be quite popular among young people. So, I wonder if they ever did a report on visual novels there.

As for the German references in a translation... Amazingly, Schnappi was a success worldwide. How come that a German-language children's song becomes No. 2 in New Zealand?! Apparently, there was even a translation to Japanese.

So it may be known to some readers, that little crocodile. Malin knew it What makes me wonder more is how to translates the German tourists that Felix encounters on the Fuji. They speak in a certain dialect (Schwäbisch).

@Jake: I think having both, German and English text on the screen would be too much. Space-wise (we'd have to figure out where to place it) and too confusing for the reader, I guess.

@DaFool: Thanks a lot for the compliments! We'll forward them to the sound team. I will ask them if it might be possible to do a recording for you. I'm not very optimistic though. I'm pretty sure the university studios aren't available to external (not course-related) productions, and as I said before sound recording and editing takes quite an amount of time. Whether the actors and actresses are still available, we'd have to find out. Most of them were voice students from a local acting/music school. They tend to participate if they get a product out of it that they can use as a reference in applications. I'll ask the sound people in the team.

@DaFool: Thanks a lot for the compliments! We'll forward them to the sound team. I will ask them if it might be possible to do a recording for you. I'm not very optimistic though. I'm pretty sure the university studios aren't available to external (not course-related) productions, and as I said before sound recording and editing takes quite an amount of time. Whether the actors and actresses are still available, we'd have to find out. Most of them were voice students from a local acting/music school. They tend to participate if they get a product out of it that they can use as a reference in applications. I'll ask the sound people in the team.

This response is not particularly addressed to Dennis, but is sort of an open forum:

Felix, Gaijin, is the visual novel that (we know of) that really has the best most professional voice sound quality. Now, I am often involved in discussions regarding reaching 'professionalism', and I think this work hits the spot, and one of the contributing factors is of course the crisp voice acting.

There is still the option of asking volunteers to speak into their ipods, but for someone who plans to eventually sell stuff, this won't be an option. That is one good hand the professional visual novel companies (mostly in Japan) have -- the infrastructure for voice acting. Even amateur circles may have to place themselves under the wing of a larger softhouse in order to take advantage of that.

I'm pretty sure some of these actors / actresses will want to pursue careers in the industry... maybe dubbing anime and cartoons, who knows...okay, so the work they do must be something they will be proud to put on their resume. I will keep that in mind when planning voiced projects.

As for getting them together, maybe it's similar to the American voice acting industry (for anime at least)... there are union people and non-union people, there's Los Angeles and there's Houston and New York, there are reputable sound studios but the actors are more or less the same and just circulate around.

It would be very convenient if the university had that sort of guild setup that makes pooling people together for a project easier. I'm also curious how much this may all cost, and I have some investment money to back me up now.

But of course, I don't want you all to scramble around investigating the feasibility of what is still a far-off proposition. But it is something serious to consider, many thanks.

The article touches upon the prohibitive production cost of using professional recording studios in the U.S. I think the university setting generally has the same level of equipment, except that costs are waived if the projects are academic-related.

But this really does open ones eyes... whose eyes? Basically anyone seeking to have voice acting in their projects with some degree of professional quality.

Oh, and by the way, I really appreciate your decision of having an english text version... I mean this audience is probably at most only a few dozen people compared to your university setting, but making that decision just on our request. Many thanks.

EDIT: Oh, and for the record the local voice-recording industry is [insert negative expletive here]. Doesn't matter whether it's anime from japan, a soap from Mexico, China, or Korea -- they use the same untalented folks who love to set the speakers to maximum harmonic resonance (over-acting). Plus having something spoken in a foreign language while the text is in english--I've gotten quite used to it.

It's excellent news - I thought that downloads were about 50 - 80 a month, and older titles about 20... I don't have statistics on my site to know about my own site though.

I guess we only measure it then, by the response in the topics? From those it's not unreasonable to think that only a handful of people are interested. I know it's not the number of actual players, but without download stats, what other indication is there?

PyTom wrote:I think that seriously underestimates the number of people interested in these games. Last month, we had 2 games in the RAA that had more than 450 downloads, and 5 more that had more than 100.

It's actually best, really, to treat this like a travelogue, rather than a story - indeed it is too tame, but I don't think it was the goal to make it story-driven. Well, let's put it this way - it really worked for me when I saw it as a travelogue and memories of experiences. In may ways it felt realistic BECAUSE most of the time nothing really spectacular happens.

Reposting from another post
So, can we ask the author what were the motivations to make a VN in an university environment? Did your finalized project get any mark from the professors or it was a year-end project?

DaFool wrote:
EDIT: Oh, and for the record the local voice-recording industry is [insert negative expletive here]. Doesn't matter whether it's anime from japan, a soap from Mexico, China, or Korea -- they use the same untalented folks who love to set the speakers to maximum harmonic resonance (over-acting). Plus having something spoken in a foreign language while the text is in english--I've gotten quite used to it.

I hate to break it to ya, but -- I'm actually kinda appreciative of our VR industry, though tainted with some bad eggs. I keep abreast on the local anime scene because I was appointed as the webmaster of an anime organization that focuses on that.

I even got the chance to meet a voice actor/director -- he once worked on the Tagalog dub of Gundam Seed -- and he narrated how he was one-upped by another voice actor/director who wants to shove his wishes into the throats of other VA's. Unfortunately, as of now, he's in the US of A -- but I bet that he's finding work in Texas, California, New York, or other prominent NA dubbing places.

so Dennis got me interested in this topic. First of all, thanx a lot for the compliments but also for any sort of productive criticism in here. Any project feeds on feedback.

@DaFoll: As a member of the sound team I do really appreciate your opinion concerning the audio quality. I'm sure that our actors will do exactly the same, since they did a great job in particular. First of all, i do believe that it is quite possible to get these actors (again) or other ones. There are many gifted voices, since there is the earlier mentioned artist school. For them and for us it is a chance to work on projects like this one. Furthermore, as long these people are students it is in their best interest to participate. Besides time, this position does not really involve money. But as Dennis mentioned earlier, too, the problem for us lies within the studio surroundings and their usage. As students we have full access to the studios and the equipment as long it is connected to a certain course or a seminar etc. Without this connection it could get quite tough to access the studios, most of all since other assessed classes have the right of usage in first place. Nevertheless there are chances to get together in one or another way (an if it's only the exchange of precious contacts). So, what i wanted to say is, if you do have a specific project, fell free to contact personally. Dennis will surely forward anything and having a nice talk doesn't cost money either!

@Adorya: Certainly we do get marks for our project. In this case, there were two courses involved (still with some marks pending ) But the marks don't really compensate the amont of work you put in. I do also believe, that in our case the motivation is not getting a mark, but working on a fun project, where everyone gets a chance on working with what he / she does best and of course the learning progress behind all of this . My personal motivation on projects like this one is also seeing and enjoying the final result. Having a product, getting to know each detail of it and working up to point, where everybody is satisfied. Wheather it is the story, the picture, the sound and so on. It's what I like doing and therefore I do - hopefully always highly motivated, even without marks or money (of course money is something, which can be highly motivating from time to time, too ) And concerning the university environment ... well, we do have classes where we can feel free to produce any media product that we please (film, audio, animation, web etc., depending on your personal focus). In this case Dennis came up with the idea, which i personally liked pretty much since in never did a VN before (didn't even hear about it ).

DaFool wrote:There is still the option of asking volunteers to speak into their ipods, but for someone who plans to eventually sell stuff, this won't be an option. That is one good hand the professional visual novel companies (mostly in Japan) have -- the infrastructure for voice acting. Even amateur circles may have to place themselves under the wing of a larger softhouse in order to take advantage of that.

I don't necessarily agree. It's enough if one person of the group has a halfway decent microphone/preamp (meaning not the $2,50 headset from the bargain bin) and a quiet room. The problematic part is collaborating via the internet, because then recordings will have to be done in different locations, and thus the audio recordings will not be consistent (different EQ, different hall in the room, different background noise, different position of the microphone etc.). [Edit: Uh, assuming you were speaking about technical quality.]